Talk:Zombie (1)/@comment-4238166-20130326163712/@comment-3575890-20130326210650
I wrote a post about this all a long time ago and I'm way too lazy to reiterate myself, so I'm just going to pull this from my Tumblr: I will address this one time and then that is it. 1) For starters, we don’t even know if Caroline and Damon had sex. It was implied sure, but we don’t know how far things went. What we do know, is that on the first night they hooked up, Damon had lured her back to her place with the proposition of sex, when his main intent was to feed off of her. We saw him get her into bed (without any compulsion or force). We saw him bite her. We saw Caroline wake up the next day clothed (if there had been a struggle, I don’t think she’d have the chance to dress herself) and instantly frightened of him once realizing she was bleeding at her neck. But we never saw them have sex then, or ever for that matter. 2) Assuming they did have sex, Damon never EVER compelled Caroline to sleep with him. He did not compel her to kiss him, or to like him or be attracted to him. He did explicitly compel her to not out him as a vampire and to not remember his feedings off of her. It is a slippery slope. It is fucked up and I do not approve of it, but it is also something I would not put a label on in terms of human standards. Damon did not forcibly rape Caroline nor did he tamper with her mental faculties in such a way that she literally had no choice but to sleep with him. Her mind had not been bent to such extremes that she couldn’t act on free will. In that respect, it was still there. Even that knowledge of what he was and what he was capable of had not been wiped clean from her mind slate. 3) Remember when Caroline took a chomp out of Matt’s neck, only to compel him to forget and then continued a sexual relationship with him anyways? Oh, just me? Well okay. But gee, vampires feeding off of humans, supressing their memories with compulsion and then continuing to have romantic relations with them - that kind of concept sure sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Remember how all the while Caroline carried on a romantic likely sexual at some point relationship with Matt, he not only had no clue as to what Caroline actually was, but had some mental faculties of his own tampered with? What is the point of all this, you ask? Well I’m pretty damn sure that Matt would not have consented to being with Caroline if he had remembered her feeding off of him, or knew what she was. In fact, if you take into account his initial fear of her once she did reveal her vamp self to him, that’s pretty much a given. But how conveniently people forget. 4) When Caroline regained her memories, she mentioned nothing about Damon violating her sexually. “You manipulated me, pushed me around, abused me, erased my memories, fed from me.” Do you seriously think if at any point Damon had raped Caroline, be it forcibly or through means of mind control, that it wouldn’t have been specifically mentioned in her recollection of memory? Not to mention, if Caroline remembered being raped, don’t you think she would have had some mental breakdown of sorts? I’m sorry if this is trigger-sensitive — I understand that people react to traumatic experiences in different ways, but Caroline exhibited no signs of being traumatized at all. Just pissed and angry about being manipulated and abused. (yes, it was definitely abuse.) I imagine that sexual violence would have added a layer to all that, and she would have had more to say to Damon than just, ”You suck,” but she was pretty together during that whole confrontation sequence. And if Damon had ever raped Caroline, wouldn’t just being around him trigger strong emotions? Yet aside from obvious detestation, Caroline is pretty much unphased by Damon’s company. She hates him sure, but for the most part, she has no problem being around him. I’d find that hard to swallow if Damon ever once sexually assaulted her. 5) Stefan has compelled women too. Does anyone remember the 2x15 flashbacks at all? We did not see him sleeping with these women, but it was still clearly there in the subtext. I’m not saying this absolves Damon, but again; if rape allegations apply to Damon, they also apply to other characters. Point is, if you’re going to look at one aspect through a certain lens, it is selective and biased of you to not look at everything else through that same lens. You put a label on one thing, you put a label on the rest. According to your logic: Damon is a serial murderer, torturer and rapist. Stefan is a serial murderer, stalker, torturer and most likely a rapist (you think he wasn’t having sex with those women in the 2x15 flashback sequences? Or wasn’t getting any sex at all during his Ripper glory days? Get real.) Katherine is a serial murderer, torturer and rapist. Caroline is a murderer and rapist. All of the Originals are the worst mass murderers the world has ever seen. Oh look, you just completely sucked anything enjoyable out of this show.Don’t you see, that when you bring vampires into human relations, it’s going to transcend some moral thresholds? Sorry, but vampires are not designed to be held to the same moral standards as human beings. If we were to judge them by human ethics, we would see them all through a one-dimensional scope. We would see them as nothing more than monsters, and there would be barely any characters left to like on this show. Television is about escapism. Do we really need to bring in real world issues where they don’t belong?